Curated by Eva Ball, this exhibition and outdoor listening party explores the band Joy Division and the Nazi forced sex slave camps of the same name.

Joy Division, the band, is an English post-punk outfit, who changed their name from Warsaw to Joy Division in 1977, borrowing their new moniker from the sex slave wing of a Nazi concentration camp described in the 1955 novel, The House of Dolls. The group played their first show as Joy Division on January 25th, 1978.

The House of Dolls describes Joy Divisions as groups of Jewish women in WWII concentration camps who were forced into slavery for the sexual pleasure of Nazi soldiers. The book is currently part of Israeli high school curriculum.

Evidence suggests that between 1942 and 1945, Auschwitz and at least nine other Nazi concentration camps contained sex slave camps, called ‘Freudenabteilung’ or ‘Joy Divisions’, used by the government to reward both Nazi soldiers and cooperative non-Jewish inmates. This kind of slavery is not an uncommon war crime.

While bassist Peter Hook and keyboardist/guitarist Bernard Sumner of the band Joy Division later admitted to being intrigued by fascism at the time, Morris (drums) insisted that the band’s interest with Nazi imagery came from a desire to keep memories of the sacrifices of their parents and grandparents during World War II alive. He argued that accusations of neo-Nazi sympathies merely provoked the band “to keep on doing it, because that’s the kind of people we are.”